Dr. Oz: How You Can Look Better (in the Middle)

If I start eating less food, I'll be hungry a lot. Will my body reprogram so that I need less food?

Yes, you can train yourself to want less food. But it's got to be a slow transition. You generally put weight on slowly, and you generally lose it slowly. If today you take in four hundred fewer calories than you did yesterday, you'll go blind from the hunger. Aim for about a hundred calories less than you normally eat — don't have the English muffin with your eggs. Get used to that, then shave off another hundred. This takes you where you want to be and makes it easier to stay there.

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ranplett/istock

What's the healthiest thing to order at a steakhouse?

It ain't the steak. Order something with tomatoes. They contain lycopene, which counteracts the effects of the saturated fat in the steak: The meat constricts your arteries, and the tomatoes dilate your arteries. Tomatoes that are heated release their lycopene more effectively, so cooked tomatoes are even better than the traditional side of sliced raw ones. And when you eat tomatoes with fat, you absorb the lycopene more efficiently. That's why the Mediterranean diet is so healthy: When you combine oil (fat) plus heated tomatoes, it's called pasta sauce, which they eat constantly.

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Marcela Barsse/istock

My wife told me not to take a multivitamin right before bed. Something about the way it's absorbed.

She's right, but for the wrong reason. The best reason not to take it right before bed is that B vitamins can give you weird dreams. Because they are metabolic cofactor vitamins, they stimulate neurotransmitters in the brain, so you blast off into dreamworld. The best way: Split the vitamin in half and take it with breakfast and dinner so you have a constant level throughout the day even as you pee them out.

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M_Studio/istock

Rickey Henderson used to eat a bowl of ice cream every night before bed. Can I?

Rickey Henderson always had a lot of muscle mass. Muscles, whether they're being used or not, burn more calories than fat does. So Rickey could eat his bowl of ice cream because those muscles were going to churn through it no matter what. He's made of muscle. If you're made of muscle, you can have ice cream, too.

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Jon Schulte/istock

Is chewing gum an appetite suppressant?

Yes. People offered food plus gum will eat less food. The only thing to be careful of is that sugarless gum — which is what's recommended — gives some people stomach problems. So if you're having diarrhea ten times a day, you'll also lose weight, but that's no good. Coffee is also an appetite suppressant. You know what else works? Those Listerine strips. Highly pungent tastes tend to blow your mouth out, so you don't have a taste-bud response to food anymore. Oh, and cigarettes work — you'll be a great-looking corpse.

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Jorge Gonzalez/istock

What's the best time of day to exercise?

Morning. It focuses your mind, you won't blow it off later in the day, and it won't keep you up at night with pounding adrenaline surges because you just benched your all-time high.

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Onur Dongel/istock

I only want to exercise for seven minutes. What should I do?

What a coincidence: I do an amazing seven-minute workout each morning. I developed it with the help of my trainer, Joel Harper. (Learn more about him and his workouts at fitpackdvd.com.) It keeps me in shape and gets me ready for the day. You can watch a video of me doing the complete routine right here.